20 years ago Jeffrey Schwartz published The Red Ape, making the case that humanity’s closest extant relatives within the animal kingdom were orangutans, not chimpanzees. This was contemporaneous with the media hullabaloo around African Eve, so either you could say that Schwartz’s timing was perfect, or it was disastrous. Certainly he was swimming against the spirit of the age, and I recall assuming that The Red Ape was a piece of crankery when I first heard about it, its thesis was so outrageous. But historically the idea that humanity descends from Asian apes is less anomalous, and many scientists of Charles Darwin’s time did not agree with his model of an African origin for humanity. The skepticism of this idea persisted deep into the 20th century, one reason that Raymond Dart’s discovery of Australopithecus africanus was met with less interest than we might assume. Only with further discoveries of numerous early hominids in East Africa by luminaries such as Richard Leaky and Donald Johanson did our probabilistic framework shift so that the unearthing of a wide range of extinct African apes elicit excitement. After all, one of these (or many) are likely to be the possible precursor to the most important species which walks the earth!
But Jeffrey Schwartz is not deterred, and continues to throw stones at the idols of the age. A few years ago he came out with a second issue of The Red Ape. Today I noticed that he has also coauthored a new paper putting forward the model that orangutans are our closest relatives, Evolution of the second orangutan: phylogeny and biogeography of hominid origins:

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Is Your Ab Workout Hurting Your Back?:

Instead, he suggests, a core exercise program should emphasize all of the major muscles that girdle the spine, including but not concentrating on the abs. Side plank (lie on your side and raise your upper body) and the “bird dog” (in which, from all fours, you raise an alternate arm and leg) exercise the important muscles embedded along the back and sides of the core. As for the abdominals, no sit-ups, McGill said; they place devastating loads on the disks. An approved crunch begins with you lying down, one knee bent, and hands positioned beneath your lower back for support. “Do not hollow your stomach or press your back against the floor,” McGill says. Gently lift your head and shoulders, hold briefly and relax back down. These three exercises, done regularly, McGill said, can provide well-rounded, thorough core stability. And they avoid the pitfalls of the all-abs core routine. “I see too many people,” McGill told me with a sigh, “who have six-pack abs and a ruined back.”

I know some readers are fitness buffs. Thoughts?

You can browse free PDFs of the Statistical Abstract of the United States online going back over 100 years (under “Earlier Editions”). It is filled with data on population, commerce, education, and so on. Excellent for doing quantitative history — and not just boring things like how population size has changed over time. During the heyday of eugenics, from 1925 to about 1943 / ’44, there was an entire chapter entitled “Defectives, Delinquents, and Dependents”– they didn’t mince words back then! I haven’t gone through and collected a bunch of data from it yet, but there’s all sorts of fun shit like this in the Statistical Abstract. Did railroads become safer or more dangerous over time? If you’ve got a little free time, you can figure it out.

So far I’m the only blogger who’s done a lot with it, probably because no one else wants to waste the time to sort through all the PDFs and numbers from scanned PDFs into Excel. The more recent editions at least have digital PDFs that allow you to copy & paste, and the most recent ones have Excel spreadsheets all ready to download. Play around with it — there’s a lot to discover.

A reader pointed me to the Population Reference Bureau which has total fertility rates for women broken down by economic fifths. Unfortunately these data are limited to developing countries, but reader might be interested in any case. In no case do the women of the richest fifth have a higher fertility than the women in the poorest fifth.

	Poorest Fifth	Middle Fifth	Richest Fifth
Armenia	2.5	1.4	1.6
Bangladesh	4.6	3.3	2.2
Benin	7.2	6.5	3.5
Bolivia	7.4	4.4	2.1
Brazil	4.8	2.1	0.7
Burkina Faso	7.2	6.8	4.5
Cambodia	4.7	3.9	2.2
Cameroon	5.9	5	3.6
Central African Republic	5.1	4.8	4.9
Chad	7.1	6.2	6.2
Colombia	4.4	2.4	1.8
Comoros	6.4	4.5	3
Cote d’Ivoire	6.4	5.7	3.7
Domican Republic	5.1	3.3	2.1
Egypt	4	3.3	2.9
Eritrea	8	6.4	3.7
Ethiopia	6.3	5.9	3.6
Gabon	6.3	4.1	3
Ghana	6.3	5	2.4
Guatemala	7.6	5.1	2.9
Guinea	5.8	6.3	4
Haiti	6.8	5	2.7
India	3.4	2.6	1.8
Indonesia	3.3	2.6	2
Jordan	5.2	4.3	3.1
Kazakhstan	3.4	2.1	1.2
Kenya	6.5	4.7	3
Kyrgyzstan	4.6	3.6	2
Madagascar	8.1	6.8	3.4
Malawi	7.1	6.4	4.8
Mali	7.3	7.3	5.3
Mauritania	5.4	4.9	3.5
Morocco	6.7	4.2	2.3
Mozambique	5.2	5.4	4.4
Namibia	6	4.6	2.7
Nepal	5.3	4.7	2.3
Nicaragua	5.6	3.1	2.1
Niger	8.4	7.8	5.7
Peru	5.5	2.6	1.6
Philippines	6.5	3.6	2.1
Rwanda	6	5.9	5.4
Senegal	7.4	6.2	3.6
South Africa	4.8	2.7	1.9
Tanzania	7.8	6.1	3.4
Togo	7.8	6	2.9
Turkey	3.9	2.7	1.7
Turkmenistan	3.4	3	2.1
Uganda	8.5	7.5	4.1
Uzbekistan	4.4	3.2	2.2
Vietnam	2.2	1.8	1.4
Yemen	7.3	7.3	4.7
Zambia	7.3	6.8	3.6
Zimbabwe	4.9	4.5	2.5

Related: Differences in fertility by class internationally.

Common problem with loci presumed to have psychological or behavioral effects, Report on Gene for Depression Is Now Faulted:

The original finding, published in 2003, created a sensation among scientists and the public because it offered the first specific, plausible explanation of why some people bounce back after a stressful life event while others plunge into lasting despair.
The new report, by several of the most prominent researchers in the field, does not imply that interactions between genes and life experience are trivial; they are almost certainly fundamental, experts agree.
…
Since then, researchers have tried to replicate the gene finding in more than a dozen studies. Some found similar results; others did not. In the new study, being published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Neil Risch of the University of California, San Francisco, and Dr. Merikangas led a coalition of researchers who identified 14 studies that gathered the same kinds of data as the original study. The authors reanalyzed the data and found “no evidence of an association between the serotonin gene and the risk of depression,” no matter what people’s life experience was, Dr. Merikangas said.
By contrast, she said, a major stressful event, like divorce, in itself raised the risk of depression by 40 percent.

This is the lot of genes which are implicated in traits of great interest, such as IQ. Science is naturally provisional, but some science makes better initial copy. Here’s the original paper, Influence of Life Stress on Depression: Moderation by a Polymorphism in the 5-HTT Gene:

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A family member just sent me this New York Times article on the recent failure to replicate a serotonin gene associated with depression in a meta-analysis by Risch and Merikangas. It gives a pretty good overview, but I think the article might be misleading in two ways:

First, beginning with the title “Report on Gene for Depression Is Now Faulted” will confuse people into thinking that the genetics behind depression will be simple, when in fact the reigning theory is that large numbers of genetic (and environmental) variants influence such complex mental traits.

Second, the critics of depression genetics make misleading points:

By contrast, she said, a major stressful event, like divorce, in itself raised the risk of depression by 40 percent.

Stressful life events are themselves quite heritable.

Must see Frontline documentary on the circumstances and aftermath of the Bank of American & Merrill Lynch merger.

Readers might be interested in a new paper in PLoS ONE, General Intelligence in Another Primate: Individual Differences across Cognitive Task Performance in a New World Monkey (Saguinus oedipus):

Individual differences in cognitive abilities within at least one other primate species can be characterized by a general intelligence factor, supporting the hypothesis that important aspects of human cognitive function most likely evolved from ancient neural substrates.

Update: See below….

The World Values Survey has a lot of data broken down by subjective social class. One of these asks how many children an individual has. So I thought it might be of interested to inspect WVS 5, generally taken around 2005, and compare differences by class in term of children. Of course there might be differences in the age breakdowns of the different classes, so that controlling for age there might be greater differences than evident. But as a coarse I thought it would be of interest. Because the data is in proportions I added up the percentage with 3 or more children in class (above replacement). For a few selected nations I calculated the mean for each class (I used WVS 3 and 4 to supplement).*

I didn’t go into this with any particular hypothesis or expectation, but I’m going to explore particular questions in future posts….

Date below.

% Who have 3 or more children by class (WVS 5)
	Upper middle	Lower middle	Working	Lower
Italy	12.2	13.2	13.7	26.7
Spain	14.4	14.2	26	53.9
Canada	26.2	27.3	33	26.1
Japan	22	23.1	21.7	25.6
South Africa	23.2	26.3	29.3	34.9
Australia	28.8	35.5	35.6	51.6
Sweden	22.6	19.6	23.1	19.2
Argentina	15.2	24.6	35.4	49.7
Finland	24.1	26.2	24.3	23.2
South Korea	13.3	21.8	31.8	28.3
Poland	11	21.2	23.9	31.7
Chile	28	33.3	46.4	47.3
India	40.6	44.2	45.3	59.3
Bulgaria	6.9	4.7	7	22.8
Romania	11.4	15.3	21.6	36.4
China	17.3	22.4	26.7	30.9
Taiwan	24.3	28	43.2	64.5
Turkey	22.5	32	31.4	54.6
Ukraine	3.2	7.8	8	9.6
Peru	29.9	28.7	37.3	53.2
Ghana	21.9	28.1	30.5	41.5
Moldova	12.2	15	26.4	26.5
Georgia	10.9	16.7	24.8	26
Indonesia	29.7	31.1	32.8	43.4
Vietnam	32.9	31.9	34.5	38.4
Serbia	10.3	8.1	10.5	14.5
Egypt	43.9	52.4	57.7	61.8
Morocco	22.7	40.3	44.8	48
Jordan	68.8	71.9	63.5	61.8
Iraq	48.8	45.8	53.2	52.5
Trinidad	24.7	30.2	32	48
Malaysia	29.8	34.1	28.1	41.4
Burkina Faso	27.9	33.4	39.9	44.7
Ethiopia	16.7	10.7	18.7	17.8
Mali	50.3	45.7	57.7	62.5
Rwanda	31.8	42.7	43	44.3
Zambia	18.3	26.5	22.9	39.7
Germany	15.6	19.1	22.6	21.7
WVS 3 & 4
Finland	23.2	24.1	16.8	26.7
Norway	23.6	23.9	25	27.3
Sweden	20.3	19	23.3	24.7
Mean number of children by class
WVS 5	Upper middle	Lower middle	Working	Lower
Sweden	1.58	1.55	1.62	1.56
Finland	1.76	1.64	1.6	1.53
Italy	1.12	1.3	1.25	1.69
Spain	1.23	1.27	1.89	2.57
Canada	1.7	1.74	2.07	1.88
Japan	1.55	1.72	1.59	1.05
South Korea	1.35	1.72	1.85	1.86
Argentina	1.23	1.61	2.24	2.61
WVS 3 & 4	Upper middle	Lower middle	Working	Lower
Finland	1.44	2.45	1.72	1.79
Norway	1.64	1.66	1.73	1.65
Sweden	1.47	1.42	1.67	1.63
Spain	1.31	1.48	1.73	2.15
Argentina	1.29	1.81	2.35	2.77
Canada	1.66	2.01	1.97	1.87
Japan	1.41	1.69	1.59	1.59
United States	1.76	1.6	1.77	N < 50, omitted
Mean # of children USA from GSS, whites age 50 and over (year 2000 and after)
Graduate degre	Bachelor	Junior College	High School	Less than High School
1.95	2.12	2.41	2.48	3.07

Readers with insights about a specific nation (because you actually know something, not rank speculation) are welcome to clarify. I was struck by the differences between Scandinavia and southern Europe. Interestingly, both Chile and Argentina exhibit the southern European pattern.

Update: Mean fertility by subjective class isn’t too hard to calculate. But the formatting is kind of crappy, so I put the table here. All from WVS 5. Remember that the N’s for “Upper Class” are almost always very small, so I’d ignore those. I’m pretty sure that the survey sample for many Third World countries are of higher SES than the population median, so don’t get too trusting of the specific numbers, but rather how the rank orders relate to each other up and down the social ladder.

Note: CSV file.

* I should have calculated the mean for each nation, but it’s rather tedious.